When We Rise Page 3

  “What I am, Michael, is a thirty-two-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew Fairy—and if it takes me a while to pull myself together and if I smoke a little grass before I can get up the nerve to show myself to the world, it’s nobody’s god-damn business but my own,” we’d exclaim to the coyotes skulking past us in the desert night.

  “Connie Casserole. Oh Mary, don’t ask.”

  Our group continued to grow, and in spring 1973 we decided it was time to put on something large and public to really announce our existence. We agreed that we’d sponsor an appearance by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, and I made the call to invite them. To our amazement, they readily agreed.

  We were a recognized student group by then, with a tiny office and a small budget from the Associated Students. I arranged to use an auditorium in the Architecture Department building and reserved some parking in the adjacent lot. A few hours before the lecture was to begin, I arrived to set up info tables and found the parking lot full of cars.

  When I complained to the parking attendant, he told me, “Hey, there’s a bunch of women here for your event.” I looked more closely and saw that many of the vehicles were dusty and had out-of-state licenses. Lesbian women from all over the southwest had driven hours over mountains and across the desert to hear Del and Phyllis speak.

  Del and Phyllis were genuine fire-breathing lesbian feminists, incensed by the pervasive violence against women. They spoke about wage disparity and employment discrimination and focused especially on the prevalence of rape and domestic violence. They believed that feminism, and lesbian feminism in particular, challenged the patriarchy and threatened the privilege of heterosexual men.

  I agreed with everything they said, but I was also a smart-ass and couldn’t resist telling Phyllis during Q & A that she sure looked a lot like my mom.

  “Fuck you, kid, I’m not your mother!” was her response. The audience roared.

  Del died in 2008, shortly after marrying Phyllis in San Francisco City Hall. Phyllis is still alive as I write this. She still reminds me of Mom.

  In those days, one could probably count the number of self-described “gay rights activists” on the fingers of two hands. There were marches in a few cities during the last week of June to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, but only a few thousand people attended even the largest of them. Homosexual conduct was a felony in almost every state, punishable by imprisonment. The only avenues for social contact were the bars, and in most cities heterosexuals, often in league with organized crime, owned the few gay bars. They could be dangerous places, subject to surprise police raids and arson attacks, and were often the venue for extortion schemes.

  We began to get more information from the coasts. The Advocate was our principal source of news, and a single copy would often be passed from hand to hand until it disintegrated. Many years later the paper would be purchased by a rich guy named David Goodstein and reimagined as sort of a gay Town & Country magazine, which my friends and I would derisively refer to as the “Avocado.”

  I began to learn about gay history. I learned of Frank Kameny, Troy Perry, Barbara Gittings, Harry Hay, and other pioneers of the movement before Stonewall. I remember the chill down my spine when I first encountered the chart of symbols assigned to prisoners in the Nazi death camps and saw the pink triangles.

  I learned about the semisecret Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis that Del and Phyllis had started in the 1950s. I read about the ancient Greeks and other societies that had not condemned homosexuals. We’d heard of Kinsey, and some of us slogged through his 1948 report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which suggested that as many as 10 percent of American males would engage in some sort of homosexual behavior during their lifetimes.

  There were a handful of gay bars in Phoenix. The younger crowd went to the Sportsmen’s Lounge on Seventh Street downtown. It was a festive place on weekend nights, but we parked several blocks away and approached cautiously through back alleys to enter the unmarked and windowless bar.

  In San Francisco I had stayed with Gary and Ron on 16th Street just a few blocks from the Twin Peaks Tavern at the corner of Castro and Market Streets, with its bold plate-glass windows overlooking the busy intersection smack in the center of the city. I’d never seen a gay bar with windows before. In San Francisco the gay bar owners were part of the community and had organized the Tavern Guild, which helped keep the mob out and somewhat mitigated the hostility from police.

  In addition to the Tavern Guild and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, the emerging San Francisco gay community had the Society for Individual Rights and a Metropolitan Community Church, part of a denomination founded by Reverend Troy Perry. In 1972 the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club became the first gay Democratic club in the nation. That same year, one of the Toklas Club’s founders, Jim Foster, became the first openly gay person to address a Democratic National Convention—albeit at three o’clock in the morning. The Toklas name was perfect for San Francisco; Alice B. Toklas was Gertrude Stein’s lover and had famously written a recipe for hashish brownies. There wasn’t much more than that to the gay political infrastructure of San Francisco at the time, but it was still light years ahead of Phoenix.

  I daydreamed of San Francisco constantly.

  It wasn’t just the gay community that drew me. I was a rocker kid, and the San Francisco Sound moved me. Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Steve Miller Band, and the Grateful Dead made music I listened to all the time. The entire Summer of Love I spent bitterly resenting that I wasn’t old enough to be there. I loved the beatniks and Ginsberg and Jack Cassidy and Kerouac and Ken Kesey and the acid test. I was also attracted by the political history of the Bay Area. I’d read histories and biographies and was fascinated by handsome Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement, the protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Longshoremen’s Strike back in the 1930s, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers, as well as the massive protests against the war in Vietnam.

  I loved the architecture of San Francisco, too, especially the densely packed Victorian and Edwardian homes stacked up right from the edge of the sidewalk. Phoenix of the 1970s was constructed mostly during the Eisenhower administration and looked it: boring cookie-cutter single-story ranch-style homes with wide lawns between them and the sidewalk and roadway. In San Francisco, the living rooms and bedrooms of the elegant Victorian and Edwardian homes built in the 1890s and early 1900s are often just inches from a narrow sidewalk crowded with pedestrians and just feet from streets busy with traffic.

  After years in the plastic, all-white suburbs I also loved the diversity of San Francisco, where one could cross a street and the language would change from Spanish to Chinese or Tagalog or Vietnamese.

  Even the weather was better. During my childhood in Pennsylvania and Michigan we shivered through bitter cold winters and sweated through summers that were hot and humid and thick with mosquitoes. Then, after we moved in 1968, we lived through the blistering summers of southern Arizona. The poet George Sterling named San Francisco “the cool grey city of love.” Regardless of season, San Francisco temperatures range from the 40s to the mid-70s. It’s pretty much sweater weather all the time and I appreciated the layered look of the other kids: blue jeans—straight-leg or bell-bottom—long-sleeved thermal undershirts, T-shirts, flannels, and hoodies under black or brown leather bomber jackets. I thought it was sexy. A friend of mine named Terry, from Portland, Oregon, would make fun of the style many years later, saying “Only in San Francisco do people wear sweatshirts over sweatshirts.”

  As the spring semester of 1973 ended, my grades were in the toilet and the desert’s summer heat was already oppressive. Some of us had produced several episodes of a gay radio program for the local FM rock station, and we’d had some success writing letters to the editors of local and campus publications. But the weekly coffee shop was shuttered for the summer, and as the heat grew, we we
re all increasingly restless. I had never really accepted Phoenix as my home, and all of us increasingly felt that extraordinary things were about to happen for gay people and that if we stayed any longer in Phoenix we were quite likely to miss the entire adventure.

  I think Cleo was the first to go. My best recollection is that she got an administrative position at Stanford University. Victor and Robert followed her to Palo Alto. We had a friend named Phil who worked at the Dash Inn restaurant in Tempe. Phil was a David Bowie devotee and saved every penny of his tips to attend Bowie concerts around the country. Phil, with his face made up all “Spiders from Mars,” would don nine-inch platform shoes, shimmering bead and crystal sheath gowns, and enormous wigs, and—just before Bowie took the stage—in the audience’s momentary hush of anticipation, he would rise from his seat, over eight feet tall counting shoes and hair, and walk dramatically up to the lip of the stage, arms overflowing with dozens of roses that he would heap at the base of the microphone stand before returning to his seat. The audience would go wild. Obviously, Phil couldn’t stay in Tempe forever.

  I drove to Los Angeles with Phil a few weeks after Bowie’s concert at the Circle Star Theater, stayed a couple days, and hitchhiked north. I would visit Cleo and Victor and Robert and then figure out my next move. I’d saved some money and I used a lot of it to rent a studio apartment for a month in East Palo Alto, which bore a distinct resemblance to a third-world war zone. East Palo Alto was almost all black, but had a small gay business area with some bars and a bathhouse. Right next door was Stanford University and its Gay Peoples Union, one of the largest gay student organizations in the country at the time. Of course I couldn’t possibly get into Stanford, or afford the tuition if I did, but it was a fun place to play. They had giant dances and gay boys and lesbian girls would come from miles around. The GPU met in the old firehouse on campus. Until a few years ago there was a photo on the wall there still showing me, with Victor and others, in front of the firehouse.

  As June ended, Victor, Robert, and I attended the 1973 Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco. The march was on Polk Street, ending at Lafayette Park, from which point we were bused to Marx Meadow in Golden Gate Park for an insane party where seemingly everyone was high on LSD. I’d never seen anything like that before. On the drive back to Palo Alto, listening to Pink Floyd’s new album, Dark Side of the Moon, I told myself San Francisco would be my home. Rich came to visit, but the city freaked him out and he said he wanted to go back to Yuma. As far as I know, that’s where he stayed.

  I stayed in the Palo Alto area for a few months, crashing on people’s floors, working odd jobs in the tiny gay neighborhood that used to be in East Palo Alto and attending meetings and dances at the Gay Peoples Union. One afternoon in early September I counted out my remaining funds and felt my stomach clench. I had my sneakers, a sleeping bag and a knapsack, long brown hair down to the middle of my back, two pairs of bell-bottom blue jeans, a hairbrush and a toothbrush, some T-shirts, underwear, and sweaters, a small bag of weed, and forty-two dollars. Plus the address of some guy named Tom.

  I packed up my stuff and walked to the on-ramp of 101 North to San Francisco, hoping I wouldn’t get caught in a shoot-out between the police and whoever the fuck was living down the street in the storefront with the sandbags and the red and black flags.

  I stuck out my thumb.

  CHAPTER 3

  Polk Street

  WHEN I REMEMBER SAN FRANCISCO THEN, IT IS ALWAYS IN FOG. COOL and grey softly shrouding the hills, or wet and cold and whipped by the wind down Market Street. There were sunny days, of course, many of them, but few people wore flowers in their hair anymore, and it seemed that the city had drawn over itself a mantle of mystery and darkness.

  Boys like me, with no jobs, no classes to attend, and nowhere else to go, hung out on Polk Street. Or, if we needed some quick cash, down on Market Street in front of Flagg Brothers Shoes, where the daddies drove by.

  The city was filled with boys like me. Boys from all over, all colors, all backgrounds. We’d come to rock and roll, we’d come to be gay, we’d come to join the revolution.

  Other boys chose LA; they bleached their hair and wore gold chains and went to auditions. Some boys went to New York; they wore Yves St. Laurent and went to law school or did real theater. But in San Francisco we wore button-fly jeans, stapled our poetry to the telephone poles, read about socialism and anarchy, danced at the Stud and Hamburger Mary’s, and after the bars closed we gathered at the Haven on Polk at California for omelets (and anything else you might want to score in the men’s room in the basement). And if, as dawn approached, you hadn’t yet found a bed to sleep in, you’d drink coffee and walk the foggy streets.

  You never knew what you’d find coming out of the fog. Psychotic people sometimes, shaking their heads and arms and cursing at the sky while they walked past the regulars: the hookers, addicts, leather men, and drag queens, the dealers, the cons and the cops.

  Or from a passing streetcar you’d see the lithe silhouette in the dark doorway, in painted-on pants with the impossible bulge at the crotch, and you’d whisper to your buddy, “Look, over there—that’s Peter Berlin.”

  Or out of an alley in a swirl of mist and smoke would emerge the ruby-lipped, Rasputin-bearded Jesus Christ Satan, Crown Prince of Arcadia, in his long smelly robes with the little dogs, ferrets, or rats peering out from the pockets beneath his cape.

  Or you’d turn a corner and run into Cosmic Lady. If you made eye contact she’d begin her rap, a sort of stream-of-consciousness update on the state of the galaxy, including, inevitably, her admonishment, “Rent’s due on the planet, folks, rent’s due.”

  If you were lucky, out of the fog would come the perfect boy: angel-faced, full soft lips, with a big cock and a room to sleep in, and breakfast and a shower in the morning.

  If you were not so lucky and turned the wrong corner, the bashers would be there with baseball bats—screaming “kill the faggots” and ready to do it. Call the police and they’d beat your ass, too.

  Sometimes you slept in a park or on rooftops. If you were cute or hung, older guys would give you money, or pay for dinner and hotel rooms. Sometimes they would let you move in for a while and give you a room of your own and regular meals. Sometimes they were assholes, but usually they were nice enough.

  I got Tom’s address from a young feminist named Karen back in Phoenix who was pretty sure it would be cool for me stay with him when I got to San Francisco, though she hadn’t heard from him in a while.

  Tom’s apartment was in a large Victorian apartment building on the southwest corner of Sacramento and Larkin, just a block up from Polk Street, near the northern edge of the Tenderloin. When he finally opened the door I saw a tall skinny guy with shaggy dark brown hair and dark circles under his eyes. He muttered something about not hearing from Karen in months, but motioned me in and down the musty hallway. He had a small studio, just a room with a sink, stove, and refrigerator at one end, and a water closet and shower at the other. No furniture at all, just sleeping bags on the floor, a transistor radio, and lots of mice.

  It was almost three a.m. and I was hungry, so I walked down to the Haven restaurant and ordered the cheapest item on the menu, a cheese omelet. When I reached the head of the line and paid the cashier the place was full, and I looked around for an open seat. The only one I found was across the table from a beautiful black guy with jewelry on his fingers and around his neck and hanging from his earlobes. Hesitating, I hovered briefly over the chair.

  The queen looked up and smiled. “Don’t be scared, child, I don’t bite.” I started to sit, and he licked his lips and said, “Unless you want me to.”

  I reached out my hand and said, “Hi, my name is Cleve. I’m from Phoenix, where are you from?”

  He smiled back and took my hand. “Nice to meet you too; I grew up in LA.” He arched his eyebrows. “Have you ever heard of the Cockettes? My name is Sylvester. I sing. Have a seat.”

  It rained hard th
at night, and I lay on the floor of Tom’s apartment on Sacramento Street, willing the mice away and listening to “Funeral for a Friend” from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album, turned down low on KSAN, as I thought about the day’s events.

  In the early hours just before dawn, with the radio silent and Tom slightly snoring on the floor beside me, the rain stopped, I could hear the foghorns at the Golden Gate and fell asleep at last.

  CHAPTER 4

  Betty Blender Finds a Tree House

  THERE WERE OTHER THINGS GOING ON IN THE WORLD IN THE FALL OF 1973.

  Syria and Egypt attacked Israeli positions in the Sinai and Golan Heights on Yom Kippur. President Nixon asked Congress for $2 billion in emergency aid for Israel, and the Arab nations responded with an oil embargo, cutting production and raising prices. This caused gas rationing and long lines at gas stations. The economy reeled, or so we read. When you’re already out of work and homeless, you don’t really register many of the ups and downs tracked by economists and investors.

  In San Francisco the Summer of Love was definitely over.

  Haight Street had been largely abandoned to heroin addicts, gay bars, and revolutionary cults. The unsolved Zodiac killings were still very much on people’s minds, and shortly after my arrival a new wave of horrific murders would grip the city. Dubbed the “Zebra killings,” the new attacks were perpetrated by African American men, usually with pistols at close range. For us boys on the street the killings were one more thing to fear, along with potentially violent “chicken hawks” and the notoriously homophobic San Francisco Police Department (SFPD). It wasn’t safe to walk alone at night, and even during the day we felt exposed and vulnerable. Mayor Alioto demanded action from the police, and soon every black male living in or passing through the city was subject to detention and interrogation. There was still a substantial African American community back then, before the twin engines of redevelopment and gentrification permanently removed thousands of middle- and working-class black families who had lived in the city for generations.